From the Beast to the Blonde

by Marina Warner

  In Latin, the phrase Apuleius uses is literally ‘an old wives’ tale’ (anilis fabula); the type of comic romance to which ‘Cupid and Psyche’ belongs was termed ‘Milesian’, after Aristides of Miletus, who had compiled a collection of such stories in the second century AD; these were translated into Latin, but are now known only through later retellings.12 The connection of old women’s speech and the consolatory, erotic, often fanciful fable appears deeply intertwined in language itself, and with women’s speaking roles, as the etymology of ‘fairy’ illuminates.

  The word ‘fairy’ in the Romance languages indicates a meaning of the wonder or fairy tale, for it goes back to a Latin feminine word, fata, a rare variant of fatum (fate) which refers to a goddess of destiny. The fairies resemble goddesses of this kind, for they too know the course of fate. Fatum, literally, that which is spoken, the past participle of the verb fari, to speak, gives French fée, Italianista, Spanish hada, all meaning ‘fairy’, and enclosing connotations of fate; fairies share with Sibyls knowledge of the future and the past, and in the stories which feature them, both types of figure foretell events to come, and give warnings.

  Like the fates who spin the future, fairies see the life to come; their words are magic, their spells are binding: the fairies’ prophecies at the princess’s christening are fulfilled when she pricks her finger on a spindle and falls into a thousand-year sleep. (Arthur Rackham, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, 1920.)

  Isidore of Seville (d. 636), in the Etymologies, gives a famous, sceptical definition of the pagan idea of fate and the Fates: ‘They say that fate is whatever the gods declare, whatever Jupiter declares. Thus they say that fate derives from fando, that is, from speaking … The fiction is that there are three Fates, who spin a woollen thread on a distaff, on a spindle, and with their fingers, on account of the threefold nature of time: the past, which is already spun and wound onto the spindle; the present, which is drawn between the spinner’s fingers; and the future, which lies in the wool twined on the distaff, and which must still be drawn out by the fingers of the spinner onto the spindle, as the present is drawn to the past.’13 These classical Fates metamorphose into the fairies of the stories, where they continue their fateful and prophetic roles. But fairy tales themselves also fulfil this function, quite apart from the fairies who may or may not make an appearance: ‘Bluebeard’ or ‘Beauty and the Beast’ act to caution listeners, as well as light their path to the future.

  Although they do not have the same root, ‘fairy’ has come under strong semantic influence from ‘fay’ and ‘fair’, both of which may be derived ultimately from the Middle English ‘feyen’, Anglo-Saxon ‘fegan’, meaning to agree, to fit, to suit, to join, to unite, to bind. Thus the desirable has the power to inspire – even compel – agreement, as well as to bind. Binding is one of the properties of decrees, and of spells. Interestingly, this root also gives ‘fee’, as in payment, for transferrals of money too arise from agreed bonds, as a response to a desire, a need.14

  The storyteller of imagination inherits the fates’ role, spinning possible versions of the future: in the second-century novel The Golden Ass, a disreputable old woman tries to console the weeping bride Charite, kidnapped by bandits on her wedding day, by telling her a love story with a happy ending.15 (Agostino Veneziano, after Michel Coxie, c. 7 530.)

  Although the ultimate origin, in time and place, of a fairy tale can never really be pinned down, we do sometimes know the teller of an old tale in one particular variation, we can sometimes identify the circle of listeners at a certain time and place. The collectors of the nineteenth century occasionally recorded the name of their sources when they took down the story, though they were not as interested in them as historians would be now. One salient aspect of the transmission of fairy tales has not been looked at closely: the female character of the storyteller.

  Italo Calvino, in his 1956 collection of Italian Fiabe, or Tales, the Italian answer to the Grimms, drew attention to this aspect of the tradition, noticing that several of the nineteenth-century folklore anthologies he drew on and adapted cited female sources.16 Agatuzza Messia, the nurse of the Sicilian scholar and collector of tales Giuseppe Pitré, became a seamstress, and, later, a quilt-maker in a section of Palermo: ‘A mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, as a little girl, she heard stories from her grandmother, whose own mother had told them having herself heard countless stories from one of her grandfathers. She had a good memory so never forgot them.’17 The Kalevala, the national poem of Finland, was collected from different oral sources and reshaped by Elias Lönnrot in the mid-nineteenth century in the form in which it is read today; Sibelius, who would compose many pieces inspired by the Kalevala’s heroes and heroines, heard the epic in part direct from Larin Paraske, a woman bard, who held eleven thousand lines of such folk material in her head.18 Karel Čapek, the utopian Czech writer most famous for his satire RUR (which introduced the concept of Robots), wrote an acute essay about fairy tale in 1931, in which he decided:

  A fairy story cannot be defined by its motif and subject-matter, but by its origin and function … A true folk fairy tale does not originate in being taken down by the collector of folklore but in being told by a grandmother to her grandchildren, or by one member of the Yoruba tribe to other members of the Yoruba tribe, or by a professional storyteller to his audience in an Arab coffeehouse. A real fairy tale, a fairy tale in its true function, is a tale within a circle of listeners …19

  He himself remembered his mother and his grandmother telling him stories – they were both millers’ daughters, as if they had stepped out of a fairy tale. The traditio does literally pass on, as the word suggests, between the generations, and the predominant pattern reveals older women of a lower status handing on the material to younger people, who include boys, sometimes, if not often, of higher position and expectations, like future ethnographers and writers of tales.

  So although male writers and collectors have dominated the production and dissemination of popular wonder tales, they often pass on women’s stories from intimate or domestic milieux; their tale-spinners often figure as so many Scheherazades, using narrative to bring about a resolution of satisfaction and justice.20 Marguerite de Navarre, in the Heptaméron, gives the stories to ten speakers, five of whom are women: they too, like the narrator of The Arabian Nights, put their own case, veiled in entertaining and occasionally licentious fantasy. Boccaccio, and his admirer and emulator (to some degree) Chaucer, voiced the stories of women, and some contain folk material which makes a strong showing in later fairy stories; the Venetian Giovan Francesco Straparola (the ‘Babbler’) reported the stories told by a circle of ladies in his entertaining and sometimes scabrous fantasies, filled with fairytale motifs and improbabilities, called Le piacevoli notti (The Pleasant Nights), published in 1550; the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile, in Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales), also known as Il Pentamerone (The Pentameron), published posthumously in 1634–6, featured a group of wizened and misshapen old crones as his sources.

  The women who inaugurated the fashion for the written fairy tale, in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century, consistently claimed they had heard the stories they were retelling from nurses and servants. Mme de Sévigné, writing to her daughter, revealingly reported a metaphor borrowed from the kitchen to describe the new enthusiasm: ’cela s’appelle les [contes] mitonner. Elle nous mitonna donc, et nous parla d’une île verte, où l’on élevait une princesse plus belle que le jour’ (it’s called simmering them [tales]; so she simmered for us, and talked to us about a green isle where a princess grew up who was more beautiful than the day).21

  Charles Perrault’s collection of 1697 bore the alternative title of Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose Tales); in an earlier preface, to the tale ‘Peau d’Ane’ (Donkeyskin), Perrault also placed his work in the tradition of Milesian bawdy, like the tale of ‘Cupid and Psyche’, but he added that he was passing on ‘an entirely made up story and an old wives’ tale’, such as ha
d been told to children since time immemorial by their nurses. While referring to a written canon, he thus disengaged himself from its élite character to invoke old women, grandmothers and governesses as his true predecessors.22 He was quick to add, however, that unlike the moral of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ (‘impénétrable’), his own was patently clear, which made it far superior to its classical predecessors:

  These Milesian fables are so puerile that it is doing them rather an honour to set up against them our own Donkeyskin tales and Mother Goose tales, or [they are] so filled with dirt, like The Golden Ass of Lucian or Apuleius … that they do not merit that we should pay them attention.23

  Perrault may have had his tongue in his cheek when he protested that ‘Donkeyskin’, a tale of father-daughter incest, was morally impeccable. But a contemporary pedant, the Abbé de Villiers, took his argument at face value, and rounded in outrage on Perrault and the writers of fairy tales, penning a pamphlet against the genre, ‘As a preventive measure against bad taste.’ There he lumped women and children together as the perpetrators of the new fad: ‘Ignorant and foolish, they have filled the world with so many collections, so many little stories, and in short with these reams of fairy tales which have been the death of us for the last year or so.’24 The diminutive form of the nouns (sornettes, bagatelles, historiettes) recurs in the rhetoric of detractors and supporters alike; the former branding fairy stories as infantile, the latter praising them as childlike. This tension between opposing perceptions of the child informs the development of the tales and continues to do so.

  Villiers sets up an imaginary debate between a fashionable Parisian and a sensible visitor from the provinces. The provincial calls them sottises imprimées (follies in print) and compares them derogatorily to fables, scorning them as ‘Tales to make you fall asleep on your feet, that nurses have made up to entertain children’.25 The Parisian counters that nurses have to be highly skilled to tell them. To which the provincial retorts that if such tales ever contained a coherent moral purpose, they would not be considered in the first place ‘the lot of ignorant folk and women’.26 The battle was joined, over the value of fairy tales; their female origin was not really contested.

  Villiers’s Parisian was putting forward the views of poets and literati like Mile Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon (p. xv) (1664–1734), a cousin and close friend of Perrault, who defended the form with fighting spirit precisely because it conveyed the ancient, pure wisdom of the people from the fountainhead – old women, nurses, governesses. In her preface to the story ‘Marmoisan, ou l’innocente tromperie’ (Marmoisan, or the innocent trick) of 1696, she declared herself a partisan of women and their stories, remembering: ‘A hundred times and more, my governess, instead of animal fables, would draw for me the moral features of this surprising story … Why yes, once heard, such tales are far more striking than the exploits of a monkey and a wolf. I took an extreme pleasure in them – as does every child.’27

  L’Héritier could never rid her praise of its defensive tone (‘the moral features’), and for good reason. The phrase ‘old wives’ tale’ was superficially pejorative when Apuleius used it on the lips of his hoary-headed crone of a storyteller; it remained so, in the very act of authenticating the folk wisdom of the stories by stressing the wise old women who had carried on the tradition. It is still, in English, an ambiguous phrase: an old wives’ tale means a piece of nonsense, a tissue of error, an ancient act of deception, of self and others, idle talk. As Marlowe writes in Dr Faustus, ‘Tush, these are trifles and mere old wives’ tales’.28 On a par with trifles, ‘mere old wives’ tales’ carry connotations of error, of false counsel, ignorance, prejudice and fallacious nostrums – against heartbreak as well as headache; similarly ‘fairy tale’, as a derogatory term, implies fantasy, escapism, invention, the unreliable consolations of romance.

  The veillées, or evening gatherings for gossip, news, and stories, were part of artisan as well as agricultural working life, in cities as well as the country. Emile Fréchon took this photograph of a woman and her audience, in a series on the Pas de Calais, around 1900, and called it ‘Narration’.

  But the idealistic impulse is also driven by dreams; alternative ways of sifting right and wrong require different guides, ones perhaps discredited or neglected. Women from very different social strata have been remarkably active in the fields of folklore and children’s literature since the nineteenth century. The Grimm Brothers’ most inspiring and prolific sources were women, from families of friends and close relations, like the Wilds – Wilhelm married Dortchen, the youngest of four daughters of Dorothea Wild, who possessed a rich store of traditional tales, and she provided thirty-six for the collection. Dorothea, the Grimms’ sister, married Ludwig Hassenpflug, and his three sisters passed on forty-one of the tales.29 From the Romantic literary circle of the artistic aristocratic von Haxthausens (who contributed collectively no fewer than sixty-six of the Grimms’ tales) Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, the poet, and her sister Jenny were among the women who eagerly took part in telling the brothers the stories they had heard as children and more recently from their local area of Westphalia.30 Oscar Wilde’s father, a doctor in Merrion Square, Dublin, in the mid-nineteenth century, used to ask for stories as his fee from his poorer patients: his wife Speranza Wilde then collected them. Many of these were told to him by women, and in turn influenced their son’s innovatory fairy tales, like ‘The Selfish Giant’ and ‘The Happy Prince’. At the end of the century, the omnivorous Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang relied on his wife Leonora Alleyne, as well as a team of women editors, transcribers and paraphrasers, to produce the many volumes of fairy stories and folk tales from around the world, in the immensely popular Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Rose Fairy Books, which he began publishing in 1890.31 The writer Simone Schwarz-Bart stitched her memories of Creole stories from her Martinique childhood into her poetic, adventurous, linguistically hybrid fictions. The grandmother Reine Sans Nom (Queen-With-No-Name) in Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972) embodies survival and history, and keeps the memory of slave culture, and of Africa before that. With the help of her friend, a sorceress, she passes on lore, fables, fairy tales, ghost stories to her granddaughter. As Simone Schwarz-Bart once said in an interview, ‘The tale is, in large part, our capital. I was nourished on tales. It is our bible … I don’t have a technique, but I know. I’m familiar. I’ve heard. I’ve been nourished … when an old person dies, a whole library disappears.’32

  The proverbial wise woman narrator was placed on the outskirts of the village, on the edge of the woods, and, according to the tradition of children’s literature, she is very old while her listeners are young. (Tom Pouce, Paris, 1825.)

  It would be absurd to argue that storytelling was an exclusively female activity – it varies from country to country, from one people to another, and from place to place within the same country, among the same people – but it is worth trying to puzzle out in what different ways the patterns of fairytale romancing might be drawn when women are the tellers.

  The pedagogical function of the wonder story deepens the sympathy between the social category women occupy and fairy tale. Fairy tales exchange knowledge between an older voice of experience and a younger audience, they present pictures of perils and possibilities that lie ahead, they use terror to set limits on choice and offer consolation to the wronged, they draw social outlines around boys and girls, fathers and mothers, the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled, they point out the evildoers and garland the virtuous, they stand up to adversity with dreams of vengeance, power and vindication.

  The veillées were the hearthside sessions of early modern society, where early social observers, like Bonaventure des Périers and Noël du Fail in the sixteenth century, describe the telling of some of today’s most familiar fables and tales, like ‘Donkeyskin’ and ‘Cinderella’.33 These gatherings offered men and women an opportunity to talk – to preach – which was forbidden them in other situations, the pulpit, the f
orum, and frowned on and feared in the spinning rooms and by the wellside. Taking place after daylight hours, they still do not exactly anticipate the leisure uses of television or radio today – work continued, in the form of spinning, especially, and other domestic tasks: one folklore historian recalled hearing the women in her childhood tell stories to the rhythm of the stones cracking walnuts as they shelled them for bottling and pickling.34 As Walter Benjamin wrote in his essay on ‘The Storyteller’:

  Monotonous tasks that are never done, like so much routine household work, provoked retaliation, in the form of dreams, gossip, stories, fairy tales. (Geertruid Roghman, Woman Spinning, Dutch, mid-seventeenth century.)